It’s the Marxism, Stupid

The allegedly-eerie similarities between the bombastic Republican presidential nominee and our late galactic Comandante are the gift that just keeps on giving. In a recent, especially auto-mojoneado little screed, Quico tried to convince us that the reason Trump won’t be as destructive as Chávez was is that he won’t be as disciplined and effective at destroying America’s democratic institutions as Chávez was at destroying ours.

It’s not any old autocrat who can create the kind of chaos Venezuela’s been experiencing. It’s a very specific kind of autocrat.

This is a dangerous self-deception from a leftie in denial about what it was that made Chávez so uniquely destructive: as though leftist ideology was an “accident” that accounted for no part of the damage Chávez did, as though institutional-destruction was the beginning and the end of the story. Quico should really know better: this isn’t about who had better etiquette (though God knows this is the first time Chávez has done better at that!) The damage Chávez did is the damage only a communist will do once in power.

In fact, Chávez serves as a cautionary tale of the resurgence of the all but dead left that somehow never got the memo once the Berlin Wall fell. Because there are plenty of dictators out there, but only a handful who set off the kind of economic cataclysm only the hard left brings about.

Of course, Chavismo was always built around an uneasy alliance between heterogenous political groups. Unlike his successor, Chávez was a master in unifying and reconciling the interest of radicals with the more pragmatic fractions of chavismo. But his long game was always establishing an “alternative” to capitalism.

Look, I’m as scared of a Trump presidency as any reasonably sane center-right pro-democracy millennial. But Trump is not surrounded by a loony team of Marxist advisors hellbent on destroying the economy for the sake of denying that there is such a thing as a market.

Failing to mention that the worst legacy of Chávez (the destruction of the Venezuelan economy) is tied to his faith in discredited economic ideas is doing a favor to people like Alfredo Serrano, Pablo Iglesias or Jeremy Corbyn. Chávez is not just a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of populist institution-busting, he’s a cautionary tale for re-branding of Marxism as hip, anti-establishment ideology.

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